Fiery protests grip France for 3rd night over police shooting of teen

French protesters erected barricades, lit fires and shot fireworks at police in the streets of some French cities overnight as tensions mounted over the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old that has shocked the nation.

Armoured police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre, where a police officer shot the teen, who is only being identified by his first name, Nahel. On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The French capital also saw garbage bins set ablaze and some store windows smashed.

In the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police sought to disperse violent groups in the city centre, regional authorities said.

Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed to quell the protests, which have gripped the country three nights in a row. More than 400 people were arrested overnight around the country and around 200 police officers were injured, according to a national police spokesperson. No information was available about injuries among the rest of the population.

Schools, town halls and police stations were targeted by people setting fires, and police used tear gas, water cannons and dispersion grenades against rioters, the spokesperson said.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 40,000 officers would be deployed overnight Thursday to Friday, with 5,000 in the Paris region alone.

"The professionals of disorder must go home," Darmanin said. While he said there's no need yet to declare a state of emergency — a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting that followed the accidental death of two boys fleeing police in 2005 — he added: "The state's response will be extremely firm."

The police officer accused of pulling the trigger Tuesday was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude "the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met." Preliminary charges mean investigating magistrates strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial.

The detained police officer's lawyer, speaking on French TV channel BFMTV, said the officer was sorry and "devastated." The officer did what he thought was necessary in the moment, attorney Laurent-Franck Lienard told the news outlet.

"He doesn't get up in the morning to kill people," Lienard said of the officer, whose name has not been released as per French practice in criminal cases. "He really didn't want to kill."

The shooting captured on video shocked France and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

The teenager's family and their lawyers haven't said the police shooting was race-related and they didn't release his surname or details about him.

Still, anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour.

"We have to go beyond saying that things need to calm down," said Dominique Sopo, head of the campaign group SOS Racisme. "The issue here is how do we make it so that we have a police force that when they see Blacks and Arabs, don't tend to shout at them, use racist terms against them and in some cases, shoot them in the head."